On the Road from Mandalay

The policy of Burma's Strongman General Ne Win is to "purify" his country of alien influence by ousting foreign businessmen, teachers and journalists. Now it is the missionaries' turn. This week the last non-Burmese Protestant ministers, their stay permits having expired, will leave the country; by the end of the year, all foreign-born Roman Catholic priests and nuns will also be forced out.

Catholic missionaries made a fruitless attempt to acquire converts in Burma during the 16th century, but Christianity did not really gain a foothold until 1722, when two Barnabite priests from Italy started preaching in Ava and Pegu. The first Protestant missionaries landed in 1807. Six years later came the great American Baptist Adoniran Judson, "the Apostle of Burma." Born in Massachusetts, he spent 37 years in Burma--including 17 months in prison, part of the time in shackles, during the country's 1824-26 war with Britain. It was Judson who first translated the Bible into Burmese. Relatively unsuccessful in converting the lowland Buddhists, missionaries worked mostly among Burma's predominantly animist hill tribes. Today there are about 600,000 Christians in a population of 24 million, half of them Baptists.

Since the hill tribes have been openly hostile to Ne Win's totalitarian rule, the missionaries have frequently been suspected of taking sides with the dissidents. Despite the clerics' protests of neutrality, and despite Burma's professed freedom of religion, mission property was nationalized last year, without compensation. A Salvation Army worker was told that she had "neglected to fulfill the guest's obligation--which is to know when to go home." Remembering that the churches flourished during the Japanese occupation of Burma in World War II, older missionaries are confident that Christianity's convert leaders (among them 750 Baptist ministers) can carry on successfully. Younger clergymen, however, are not so sure, and the Roman Catholics are downright pessimistic. More than half of the Catholic clergy are foreign-born, including five of Burma's eight bishops, and the country has only one, poorly staffed, college-level seminary.

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